Cultural exchange and interbreeding between African hunter-gatherers, Neolithic European farmers, and shepherds in the Eastern Sahara significantly influenced changes in lifestyles, cultural expressions, and genetic makeup in the Maghreb between 5500 and 4500 BC, according to a recent study. .

For years, researchers have tried to understand the transition from the hunter-gatherer roots of humanity to farming and animal husbandry practices. What was the impetus for the “Neolithic revolution”? Where did it all start and how did it spread?

To answer some of these questions and, as always in science, to introduce new ones, an international team from the universities of Córdoba, Huelva and Burgos carried out a study. Results of the new study published in the journal Nature dispels some myths about the beginning of the Neolithic in North Africa about 7,500 years ago and thus agriculture.

Until recently, archaeologists debated the origins of agriculture and animal husbandry in North Africa; that is, whether it emerged independently and whether people living in the area domesticated local species and developed methods similar to those used by those living in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys; whether this process is purely the result of cultural transfer from other regions such as the Near East or the Mediterranean.

A new study by the University of Uppsala and Burgos, in which the Moroccan Institute of Archeology and Cultural Heritage (INSAP) plays a key role, shows that neither vision is correct. Rather, the beginning of the Neolithic in North Africa was the result of a complex and multifaceted process like few in the light of the archaeological record ever observed in the Old World as a whole.

The originality of the research lies in the combined genomic reading of Neolithic human remains from three important sites: the Kaf Takht el-Ghar cave at Tetouan; Ifri n’Amr Ou Moussa in Hemisset province; and Schirath-Roisy, south of Rabat. In the first case, the remains of a small group of individuals descended from European farmers who settled in the area about 7,400 years ago were identified and studied.

In the second, the existence of a necropolis was confirmed in a cave where people of purely local origin were buried several centuries later; that is, pottery farmers descended from local hunter-gatherers who adopted these new methods from the above-mentioned migratory groups. Finally, in a third prehistoric necropolis dating back millennia, genomes linked to the spread of herding peoples in the Fertile Crescent, which archaeologists have found in present-day North Africa, have been discovered.

Dating and genomic studies of all these remains allowed this Iberian-Swedish-Moroccan team (lead author Luciana Simoins, a Portuguese researcher from Uppsala University) to confirm the biological and cultural diversity of people who lived in the area for more than 7,000 years. may have been the reason for the success of the neolithicization in North Africa.

The work published in this context, Nature – and on Rafael M. Martinez, University of Córdoba: Juan Carlos Vera, University of Huelva; and Cristina Valdiosera of the University of Burgos, co-director of the project, are co-authors – making it clear that there were groups of people on both sides of the Bosphorus long before the Romanization of the western Mediterranean, and certainly long before the Islamization of the region. Gibraltar was already sharing knowledge through cultural aspects and of course genes.

According to Rafael M. Martínez of the University of Córdoba, this work represents “a turning point in our understanding of many aspects of Neolithic spreading processes in the region, resolving the question of its origin in Andalusia and the Maghreb”. The unidirectionality of the process seems quite evident, probably from Iberia, placing the printed ornaments of these early Moroccan pottery in a wider set of early decor pottery from the western Mediterranean, including the Italian peninsula, southern France, and the Iberian Mediterranean.

Regarding the ‘idyllic’ component of the Schirat necropolis, Martínez said, ‘the ceramics found as decorations in these tombs have precedents in styles formerly known throughout the Sahara, which are completely different from the earliest printed wares and decorated with string patterns. Our work in 2018 has already shown a link between this type of pottery and herding peoples; or at least from a very different background.’

Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Vera stressed that Genomics has come to confirm what archeology has already claimed for the last decade: “The genetic sample campaign was carried out in 2016, but in parallel, a clear, complete picture of cultural and economic-social changes. At CSIC ( The population movements currently shown would not have been possible without the archaeological studies we conducted in Morocco between 2011 and 2013 as part of the ERC AGRIWESTMED project coordinated by archeobotanist Leonor Peña-Chocarro (Madrid) thanks to an agreement coordinated by Moroccan INSAP and our colleague Yusef Bokbot These studies led to the discovery of ancient cereal and leguminous seeds that grew in many of these Neolithic contexts, and in this case already show a spreading process.

Cristina Valdiosera, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the University of Burgos and Matthias Jakobsson and co-director of the project, concluded that this is a study of great importance for the genomic history of North Africa.

The settlers of the Maghreb, the historical Berbers (imazighen), have ancestors of three main components: the first – African hunter-gatherers, who existed in the Taforalt Cave since the Upper Paleolithic; European Neolithic farmers, descended from the first peasants of Anatolia, who spread across the Mediterranean and probably arrived in Morocco from the Iberian Peninsula around 5500 BC; and finally, pastoral peoples who crossed the Sinai from the Fertile Crescent and penetrated the African continent west and south, reaching the Moroccan Atlantic about a thousand years later. Source